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These Women Are Building The Software That Quietly Runs The World [Feb. 9, 2014]

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zondag, 9 februari 2014

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Business Insider

It's no secret that there are far fewer women technologists working in the industry than men.
When it comes to computer-related jobs, men outnumber women at a rate of about 4 to 1.

And when it comes to the open-source software industry, women are even harder to find. A recent study found that 1 out 10 open-source programmers are women (about 10%), and that's up from 2007, when only 2 out of every 100 were women (about 2%).

The lack of women gives the tech industry, and particularly the open-source portion of it, a distinctly sexist feel.

Despite these sad statistics, it is absolutely possible for a woman in the field to go far and have a fabulous career. So we asked the Linux Foundation, the granddaddy of all open-source projects, to give us a list of stand-out women doing fabulous work.

Linux is an operating system software (a competitor to Microsoft Windows) that is quietly running the world. It is the foundation of the Android operating system. It's the software behind a lot of consumer tech, from televisions to washing machines. It is used in nearly every corporate data center and on most supercomputers. It powers everything from banks to nuclear submarines.

So, here's our list of women with awesome careers working on Linux, the tech that's quietly running the world...

Angie Byron, Director of Community Development at Acquia
Acquia is the commercial arm of Drupal, a free open-source content management system for websites. Drupal is another hugely popular open-source project and is often used on servers running Linux.

Byron has been a face in the open-source software world since 2011, when she was the first women to be featured on the cover of Linux Journal.

She's been involved with open source since the mid-'90s, she said, because she loves how it lets anyone "tinker with" software written by others.

"I’ve found that the community of folks I've encountered in Drupal, Linux and other open-source projects is also simply amazing: friendly, intelligent (but down to earth about it), hilarious, sincere, and endlessly passionate."